Al***s ruined by poor production?

Posted by: ejl on 27 April 2002

Re-listening to "Baptism" by Joan Baez recently made me realize how lousy production/engineering can damage the work of even the most determined and talented musician. The production on this album is really dreadful; bright, hard string and wind sounds, sloppy and premature cuts between tracks, uneven recording levels among tracks, and so forth.

A pity; get past the stridency of the opening tracks and there is some really striking work trying to get out. This album was largely dismissed for reasons that may have been outside of Baez's control. I wonder what others might fit in this category?
Posted on: 27 April 2002 by JohnS
I may be alone in thinking that this is a classic pop album (that's "Blondie", everybodes) but my German vinyl pressing was excellent. The CD version sucks donkey balls. OK, OK, probably not poor production but definitely poor mastering smile

-John
Posted on: 28 April 2002 by Cheese
The absolutely worst-sounding album of all time. Some call it "a revolutionary album". I don't. Urgh !

Cheese
Posted on: 28 April 2002 by David Dever
Keep in mind that "production" does, to a large extent, also include coaxing the best performance possible out of the musicians.

Sometimes this might include blaring a huge PA in a big room while recording drum parts (Craig Leon on the Ramones records), compressing the **** out of the monitor mix to force the band to play louder and more aggressively in tone, or, simply, flexing against the limitations of a recording budget (and tape machine track counts) at a time when no one thought that rock-n-roll would ever take off, especially on Verve!

Recording is not exclusively about audiophile sound quality, I'm sorry to say, though it seems that the best systems seem to extract the music out without problems...

Dave Dever

P.S. The Velvets always sounded good on decent Euro vinyl, esp. WLWH.

[This message was edited by David Dever on SUNDAY 28 April 2002 at 19:07.]